Rails on Campus Roundup / Rails on Campus 大聚集

Last Saturday we concluded the Rails on Campus: 华农版 (SCAU) program with session #3. We wish to thank Dean Song, Professor Sun, and all the students who took the time to attend. We really appreciate working with such amazing students, and we were very happy to be able to come to your school.

We also would appreciate any feedback, so please let us know how we can make the event go more smoothly next time, or if there's anything else we should cover. We hope to take this program to other universities in the area, and perhaps come back to SCAU for a second season next year.

Session #3 / 第三届

The third session in our program focused on completing the feature set to make our miniblog a full web application. Of course we needed a way for users to log in, so that we know who says what. To that end, we went over how to track user sessions, and how to use before_filters to manage users and make sure they log in when they need to.

gzruby rubygems - make sure to follow the instructions here if you are in China

Rails on Campus is a program started by Leon Du and Shaokun Wu, 2 ruby developers in Guangzhou, China. The idea is to build a good set of material for introduction courses that can be used to teach Rails on college campuses. College students are often not exposed to the latest development techniques, and are left to learn on the job. The goal of this program is to introduce students to the world of open source development frameworks to help prepare them for a good job.

Last week we had our first Rails on Campus session at the South China Agriculture University (华南农业大学). We had an excellent turnout of 50 or 60 top-notch students. We were really impressed with their knowledge of web development in general, and their enthusiasm to learn new things.

Creating a new Rails app from the command line and adding a simple scaffold

We built a working web app as a demo in about 10 minutes, starting from rails new and finishing with a nice looking miniblog.

The only problem was the recent issues we've been having accessing rubygems from China. This made it very difficult for the students to get a Rails environment working on their own laptop. We hope to have a good solution for this problem before the next session.

For our next session, we'll continue to build on the same application by adding a reply feature.

Rails on Campus is a program started by Leon Du and Shaokun Wu, 2 ruby developers in Guangzhou, China. The idea is to build a good set of material for introduction courses that can be used to teach Rails on college campuses. In Guangzhou, and many other areas around the world, college students are often not exposed to newer technology, and are left to learn on the job. The goal of this program is to introduce students to a new world of open source development frameworks that are quite popular around the world. Not just Rails, but also things like Node.js or Python/Django.

After 2 great sessions of Rails on Campus: 华工版, we'd like to thank everyone who took part in helping to plan and organize this event. We learned a lot from the experience, and we hope the attendees did as well. We plan to take our materials from this first run, refactor, and put on a better program next year!

Before we close out for the year though, I wanted to go over what you can do to continue learning on your own.

Install Rails

http://railsinstaller.org - Download and run the installer. It will install everything you need to get started writing your own Rails apps (ruby, git, rubygems, rails).

The first Rails on Campus session went very well last saturday, with around 50 budding rubyists in attendance. We went over the history and purpose of Ruby and then Rails, and then did a live demo of: Build your own miniblog in 20 min.

As the popularity of Rails grows, the number of resources available to learn Rails also grows. One of the best methods that has come about is the use of Screencasts. Screencasts are movies that show the code as you listen to the presenter explain the concepts. Often, they go over material that can be found in books. But presented in this way, it might sink in a little better as you use 2 of your senses to absorb the material.

First, there is a set of excellent FREE screencasts from Ryan Bates at http://railscasts.com. These are short and to the point, often highlighting a new feature. You can have them download to your computer automatically through iTunes (except in China where Feedburner is blocked), or you can download them directly from the website. There is a set dedicated to the new features of Rails 2.1 that deserves to be checked out.

Second, the father of screencasts, @topfunky a.k.a Geoffrey Grosenbach has put together a great set of training materials at peepcode.com. They are not free, but quite affordable at $9 per cast. They are well done, informative, and full of great examples. We have used them to get up to speed on new versions of Rails, and downloaded some of the PDF books. I highly recommend these materials to get more familiar with Rails.